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Proverbs 23: What the Passage Says

78 claims across 35 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Proverbs 23 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter continues the collection of sayings from a teacher to his son. It gives warnings about eating with a ruler, wearing yourself out to get rich, accepting food from a stingy host, speaking to a fool, and moving an old boundary stone onto an orphan's land. It then calls for disciplining a child, respecting parents, buying truth and never selling it, and giving the son's heart to the teacher's way. It closes with extended warnings against the prostitute and the adulteress, and against heavy drinking and its results.

Claim by Claim

  1. 23:1
    • When you sit down to eat with a ruler, consider carefully what is before you.
  2. 23:2
    • Put a knife to your throat if you are a man of great appetite.
  3. 23:3
    • Do not crave the ruler's delicacies.
    • The ruler's food is deceptive food.
  4. 23:4
    • Do not wear yourself out to become rich.
    • Stop relying on your own understanding.
  5. 23:5
    • When you set your eyes on wealth, it is gone.
    • Wealth certainly makes wings for itself.
    • Wealth flies off toward the heavens like an eagle.
  6. 23:6
    • Do not eat the food of a man with a grudging eye.
    • Do not crave his delicacies.
  7. 23:7
    • As a man calculates within himself, so he is.
    • He says to you, 'Eat and drink.'
    • His heart is not with you.
  8. 23:8
    • You will vomit up the morsel you have eaten.
    • You will waste your pleasant words.
  9. 23:9
    • Do not speak in the hearing of a fool.
    • A fool will despise the good sense of your words.
  10. 23:10
    • Do not move an ancient boundary marker.
    • Do not enter the fields of the fatherless.
  11. 23:11
    • The redeemer of the fatherless is strong.
    • Their redeemer will plead their case against you.
  12. 23:12
    • Bring your heart to instruction.
    • Bring your ears to words of knowledge.
  13. 23:13
    • Do not withhold discipline from a boy.
    • If you strike him with the rod, he will not die.
  14. 23:14
    • You are to strike him with the rod.
    • You will deliver his life from Sheol.
  15. 23:15
    • The speaker addresses his son.
    • If your heart is wise, my own heart will rejoice.
  16. 23:16
    • My inmost parts will exult when your lips speak what is right.
  17. 23:17
    • Do not let your heart envy sinners.
    • Remain in the fear of the LORD all day long.
  18. 23:18
    • There is surely a future.
    • Your hope will not be cut off.
  19. 23:19
    • Listen, my son.
    • Be wise.
    • Guide your heart straight on the way.
  20. 23:20
    • Do not be among those who drink too much wine.
    • Do not be among those who gorge on meat.
  21. 23:21
    • The drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty.
    • Drowsiness will clothe a person in rags.
  22. 23:22
    • Listen to your father, who fathered you.
    • Do not despise your mother when she is old.
  23. 23:23
    • Buy truth.
    • Do not sell truth.
    • Buy wisdom, instruction, and understanding.
  24. 23:24
    • The father of a righteous man will greatly rejoice.
    • He who fathers a wise son will have joy in him.
  25. 23:25
    • Your father and your mother will be glad.
    • She who bore you will rejoice.
  26. 23:26
    • The speaker tells his son to give him his heart.
    • The speaker tells his son to let his eyes take delight in his ways.
  27. 23:27
    • A prostitute is a deep pit.
    • A foreign woman is a narrow well.
  28. 23:28
    • She lies in wait like a robber.
    • She increases the number of treacherous people among men.
  29. 23:29
    • Someone has woe.
    • Someone has sorrow.
    • Someone has quarrels.
    • Someone has complaining.
    • Someone has wounds without cause.
    • Someone has dullness of eyes.
  30. 23:30
    • Those who linger long over wine have these things.
    • Those who go to search out mixed wine have these things.
  31. 23:31
    • Do not look at wine when it is red.
    • Do not look at it when it gives its sparkle in the cup.
    • Do not look at it when it goes down smoothly.
  32. 23:32
    • In the end wine bites like a serpent.
    • In the end wine stings like a viper.
  33. 23:33
    • Your eyes will see strange things.
    • Your heart will utter perverse things.
  34. 23:34
    • You will be like one who lies down in the middle of the sea.
    • You will be like one who lies down at the top of a mast.
  35. 23:35
    • You will say, 'They struck me, but I was not hurt.'
    • You will say, 'They beat me, but I did not feel it.'
    • You will say, 'When will I awake?'
    • You will say, 'I will seek wine again.'

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

23:1
Chapters 22:17–24:22 form a separate collection headed "the words of the wise," and several sayings in it run closely parallel to an Egyptian instruction text, the Teaching of Amenemope. This one begins a short unit (verses 1–3) about eating at a powerful man's table, where a meal was rarely just a meal: hospitality from a ruler could be a test of the guest's self-control or the opening move in placing him under obligation.
23:2
A deliberately shocking figure of speech, not advice to harm yourself. It means something like "treat your own appetite as a mortal danger", hold a blade to it.
23:3
"Dainties" in 1611 English simply meant choice or luxurious food, not something delicate or small. Calling it "deceitful meat" (meat = food of any kind in the King James) means the food comes with strings attached: what looks like generosity may be a trap.
23:4
The old words say "cease from thine own wisdom." That means stop thinking you are clever enough to get rich.
23:5
The Hebrew has a wordplay the English loses: you make your eyes "fly" toward wealth, and the wealth flies away. "That which is not" is a blunt Hebrew phrase for something that has simply ceased to exist.
23:6
"Evil eye" is a Hebrew idiom for stinginess or grudging generosity, a man who resents what he spends on you. It has nothing to do with cursing someone by looking at them. Its opposite, a "good eye," means openhanded.
23:7
The King James reads "as he thinketh in his heart, so is he," and that line is often quoted on its own as a proverb about self-image. The Hebrew here is difficult and probably means something quite different: he is inwardly reckoning, tallying up the cost of what you eat. In Hebrew the "heart" is the seat of thought and decision, closer to what we call the mind than to the emotions.
23:8
"Sweet words" were the polite thank-yous a guest said to his host. Here they are wasted on a greedy man.
23:9
In Proverbs a "fool" is not someone who learns slowly. It means a person who has decided he does not want to be taught anything.
23:10
Property lines were marked by stones set in the ground. Quietly shifting one at night stole land from a neighbor who had no deed and no survey to appeal to, which is why the practice is condemned repeatedly in Israelite law. Orphans were targets because they had no adult male to defend the family holding.
23:11
"Redeemer" translates the Hebrew go'el, the nearest male relative, whose duty was to buy back land the family had lost, to buy relatives out of debt-slavery, and to press their claims in court when they could not. The saying's point is that the fatherless, who appear to have no such kinsman, in fact have a powerful one.
23:12
Heart here means your thoughts and your wishes, all of you inside.
23:13
The "rod" is a shebet, the stick a shepherd or herdsman carried. "Correction" here covers the whole business of training and disciplining a child, of which physical punishment was one accepted part in this culture.
23:14
"Hell" in 1611 English translated the Hebrew Sheol, the shadowy underworld where all the dead were thought to go. It is not the place of punishment that the English word suggests today. The line means the discipline keeps the child from an early death.
23:15
"My son" is the standard way a teacher addresses a student throughout this kind of instruction literature; it need not mean a literal father speaking to his own child.
23:16
The King James "reins" means the kidneys. Hebrew located the deepest emotions in the internal organs (kidneys, liver, bowels) much as English speakers locate them in the heart.
23:17
"The fear of the LORD" is a set phrase in this book for reverent loyalty toward God, closer to awe and allegiance than to being frightened. LORD in small capitals marks the personal name of Israel's God, which Jewish tradition avoided pronouncing.
23:18
The King James "there is an end" uses "end" in its older sense of outcome or final result. The Hebrew word means what comes afterward, a future, a hereafter.
23:20
Meat was a rarity in ordinary Israelite diets, eaten mainly at festivals and sacrifices. Regularly gorging on it marks a person out as extravagant, not merely hungry.
23:21
Rags are old clothes full of holes. Wearing rags meant a person had become very poor.
23:22
"Begat" is the old word for fathered. The verse pairs the father who gave you life with the mother you must not brush aside once she is old and no longer strong.
23:23
Buying and selling are used here as a figure for what something costs you and what you refuse to part with. Truth and wisdom are things worth spending on and never trading away.
23:24
"Righteous" means a person who does what is right and deals honestly with others.
23:26
"Give me thine heart" means listen with your whole self. It is about love and attention, not the beating heart inside.
23:27
A "deep ditch" and "narrow pit" are cisterns, bottle-shaped shafts cut into rock to store water, wide below and narrow at the neck. Falling in meant you could not climb out. The King James "strange woman" does not mean odd; it means a woman outside your own household or community, in these chapters usually another man's wife.
23:28
"Transgressors" here translates a Hebrew word for people who break faith or betray a trust, rather than lawbreakers in general.
23:29
Verses 29–35 are a small riddle: a string of questions whose answer is withheld until the next verse. "Babbling" in 1611 English meant grumbling or complaining, not chatter.
23:30
Wine in this period was routinely diluted with water; "mixed wine" is the opposite, wine blended with spices or other additives to make it stronger and more potent, a connoisseur's drink.
23:31
"Moveth itself aright" is obscure old English for the wine going down smoothly. The three clauses describe the drink at its most appealing: the deep color, the sparkle in the cup, the easy swallow.
23:32
An adder is a snake whose bite carries poison.
23:33
The Hebrew word is genuinely ambiguous and has been read both ways since antiquity: it can mean "strange things," as in hallucinations, or "strange women." The King James chose the second, most modern translations the first.
23:34
Israelites were not a seafaring people, and the open sea stood in their imagination for chaos and helplessness. The two pictures are of a man asleep in the middle of the ocean and a man lying on the rigging at the top of a mast, pitching about with no idea where he is.
23:35
These are the words of a man who drank far too much. He was hit but was too drunk to feel it. Even so, he wants more.

Read Proverbs 23